I guess I’ll be the bad guy OH BROTHER, no denying there’s plenty to chew on here about mythmaking and fanaticism, progress and coexistence, having Noa be our proxy to reflect on this saga is a welcome perspective. The attempt to balance it all is plodding and distant though, stretching its runtime out to painful lengths, and I think I’m just a lost cause on how self serious these movies are. Even the jokes can’t pierce through the dour veil…
Reviews tagged ‘theater’ by Sydney🚀 Patron
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Spider-Man 3 2007
Like an entire season of your favorite comic book soap opera scrambled into 2 hours and 19 minutes, forgiveness as a superpower and selflessness as a nonnegotiable lesson when coming of age. Sam Raimi the man who can animate drying paint, that there isn’t a drop of irony in the whole thing is both a comforting escape and sad reminder that these just don’t look like they used to. Mary Jane Watson you are literally stronger than the marines.
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Boy Kills World 2023
Oh I am simultaneously heartbroken and pissed off. One of the most obnoxious uses of voiceover ever but that is just one decision of many that turned this really cool premise into a grating slog and completely wasted the choreography/cast. I genuinely really wanted to like this but at every turn I was scratching my head or rolling my eyes. Needed 10x less Deadpool and 10x more Speed Racer.
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Challengers 2024
Hey we saw you from across the tennis court and really dig your vibe, do you want to engage in a biblical level throuple over multiple decades
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Abigail 2024
It’s possible I just have a very short-lived appetite for the brand of horror that Radio Silence puts out, but this felt very conveyor belt to me compared to the witty, fully realized thrill ride of Ready or Not (they share a lot of similarities). Of course the premise is fun and makes for some pleasing moments of blood and guts, and the cast is easily the strongest element, but lots of jokes don’t work and I just can’t get…
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The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare 2024
I will be first in line for a Guy Ritchie film until I die, but I haven’t felt that edge from him in a while and at this point it just feels like wasted potential. He approaches basically his Inglourious Basterds with a nonchalance we’ve seen before - they’re slicing through Nazis like butter, blowing shit up with reckless abandon, and somehow always getting away with it. It’s charming, but I’d be hard pressed to note a sequence in here that…
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The First Omen 2024
For all the talk about Immaculate being shocking, The First Omen kind of just showed them up with the freaky shit! There are definitely signs of some studio-influenced editing tomfoolery, which was to be expected from an addition to a franchise like this and can hobble the narrative at times. Sad, but Arkasha Stevenson’s direction shines through with a heavy assist from Nell Tiger Free’s star making performance. Real ones have known how great she is since Servant. Really gorgeous…
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Sting 2024
You know what… on one hand this was the clunky/generic stuff I expected, but on the other hand the whole end is trying to do Alien/Aliens and it doesn’t completely fail so I respect that. Not everyone will recognize your game, Sting (that name is a cool reference, too). None of the characters are all that likeable and it gets very tonally confused on its mission to B movie status, but at least there’s something going on here (read: clearly inspired by movies…
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Problemista 2023
Problemista! A movie that delivered on all the chaotic whimsy I fell in love with from the trailer, but surprised me in so many ways. A hilarious and necessarily honest depiction of the US immigrant experience as death by a thousand needless, counterintuitive paper cuts, but Julio Torres threads it into something so insistently optimistic through Alejandro’s relationship with Tilda Swinton’s Elizabeth. Two people who couldn’t be more different, but might only be truly understood by each other. Two little…
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Road House 2024
Take this rating with a grain of salt because I saw this on opening night at SXSW with an insanely hype crowd, but I was honestly pleasantly surprised by how self aware it is as a remake. Not taking itself too seriously was very necessary, but the action is also pretty decent (apparently there is some whack CGI but i wasn’t close enough to notice). End of the third act goes BIG and reminded me of Face/Off. Jake Gyllenhaal is…
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Civil War 2024
The good news is that Civil War is not the heavy-handed right vs. left eye roller that the trailers might have made it seem like. Actually, Garland has almost completely abstained from political specifics and instead made a Heart of Darkness-type road trip film through the lens of war photographers as they travel from New York to DC in a war-torn America. I love this idea and the conversation about the impact of an image, desensitization, to what lengths the…